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Monday, March 24, 2014

My Ethical Dilemma

This may be sacrilege coming from a community college instructor, but I couldn't agree with Michael J. Petrilli more. The college route is not for everyone, and sometimes it seems to me that encouraging kids to keep pursuing academic failure is downright cruel and exploitative. Why am I trying to teach that young man to write essays when he (and I and society in general) might be benefiting from his brilliant mechanical aptitude instead? What's wrong with working oneself up to a management position in a fast food franchise? We need to be offering these kids more pathways to self-sufficiency and "the good life" than joining the military.

5 comments:

You're allowed to be only middle class in America.That means college.Being in the trades means you're uncouth in some fashion. You don't have the personality gloss or finish of a college graduate. That means you can't hold up your end of the brittle chatter at a middle-class party.

I'm a working-class person through and through. That's despite going to college. For many years, I strived in shame to fit into the middle class social milieu as I found it. I failed, which turned out to be good fortune for me. I have been psychologically freed to return to my own culture, to the working-class project of being, doing, knowing.

For what it's worth, I work in publishing (in its grimiest and most laborious quarter, believe me), and after nearly 25 years of reading educated, middle-class people's essays and everything else, I cannot figure out what need there is for even one more regulation, carefully worded, carefully organized essay talking about life from the middle-class point of view.

From my perspective, that's been a viewpoint of unknowing gluttony and heedlessness that has brought the entire world (because it was always a planet-consuming, domineering vision) to the threshold of doom.

Cinzia, if you can encourage your charges to do anything except slide behind the wheel of this juggernaut death-machine civilization, please do so with all speed.

The smittenness is mutual—though I may have been first. You're doing heroic work here sending arrows through the thin breasts of these manosphere barbarians, Cinzia. There should be roses under your feet.

While I wouldn't exactly say I was ill-suited to college (or university as it's known here) - I got the requisite marks for the course I wanted to do (science), and was always interested in what I chose to study - going on to do it after school turned out to be pretty much a waste of time for me, as I ended up dropping out, after spending five years muddling my way through a degree that should've only taken me three (and which I learned, towards the end of my time at the place, probably wouldn't have been worth the paper it was printed on anyway). It was just impressed upon me, however, that going to university after school was what you did if you wanted to get anywhere in life. Oh well, if nothing else, I probably learned enough chemistry while I was there to enable me to start my own meth business, should I ever be diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, and given only a few months left to live.